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Tag Archives: dancers

Mark Morris in the original performance of “O Rangasayee,” 1984. Photo: Beatriz Schiller

A young saddhu, a lone devotee, with nothing to his name but passion for the form of god he’s chosen to worship and the rag of a dhoti wrapped around his loins, crouches in a ball in dim golden light at the back of the stage. He slowly raises his head and shoulders, stands, and strikes a pose. Then another. The poses form a sequence. They’re reminiscent of figures in Indian temple sculpture, but not quite classical somehow. One arm is outstretched like an arrow; the hand on the other, palm outward, covers eyes that gaze up and away. Or his hands hang limply from his arms, bent like dog paws. Or, with both palms down and open toward the audience, his head bobbles on his neck, looking like something between an elegant Indian dance move and a camp imitation of a kitschy Eastern European tchotchke—you know, the one your mother brought back from Romania. His torso welcomes torque. His fingertips and palms are painted betel red. So are the outlines of his feet. A sitar whines, a tabla strikes, a raga singer with a plaintive voice wills the devotee to action.

Thus begins “O Rangasayee,” by Mark Morris, one of the great modern dance solos of the twentieth century. Morris made this work for himself as a young man early in 1984. In December that year, he performed it as part of a sensational program in BAM’s Lepercq Space, after which The New Yorker’s Arlene Croce anointed him the Next Great Thing and he exploded onto the scene. It’s not clear how the audience that night had found their way there—I knew someone who worked a restaurant kitchen with some company members—or what they were expecting—but had a meteor crashed through the ceiling and landed smack in the middle of the gymnasium-like space, smoking and spitting flames at the bleachers, it wouldn’t have been met with a greater sense of awe. Read More

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Once upon a time, a newly married couple rode an old train from Myrdal to Flåm. The train passed through mountains and valleys, past waterfalls and vast lakes. Often the climb was dramatically steep, the hairpin turns almost impossibly sharp. The passengers ran from window to window in a frenzy of excitement, exclaiming at the vivid scenery, blinking in wonder when the train emerged from a tunnel.

A voice spoke to the passengers, first in Norwegian, then in German, then English. The voice spoke of gradients and history: of the men who had built tracks from wood and stone and the many people who had ridden on the red seats of the old train. And there were legends, too: this was folklore country. The land through which the train was passing was said to be haunted by trolls and fays. The valleys were home to the Hulder, a forest siren who lured mortals with her unearthly song. The bride squeezed her husband’s hand in excitement. Here was magic; here was darkness. Read More

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In one of Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, “In The Electric Tram,” the narrator describes the feeling of well-being that comes with sitting in a moving vehicle on a rainy afternoon: the joy of lighting a cigarette, the satisfaction of composing a tune in his head, the urge to strike up a conversation with the reticent conductor. His gaze takes in the other passengers: “the drooping mustaches, the face of a weary, elderly woman, a pair of youthfully mischievous eyes belonging to a girl,” before happily settling on his footwear. “I must say,” he confesses to his reader, “I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead.”

The German industrial city of Wuppertal still has a functioning electric tram, which hangs from long beams like an aerial camera and which travels through Wim Wender’s new 3-D dance movie, Pina, an homage to the German choreographer Pina Bausch. It is a running joke, appearing during the movie’s opening titles as the audience grapples with their 3-D glasses and cropping up in different scenes throughout the film—suspended above two dancers performing a duet on a roundabout, or situated below a dancer who, sitting on the tram’s old fretwork, shoves his legs around as they pop up like disobedient wooden beams. Later, in the tram’s car, a male dancer wearing cardboard cut-out Spock ears takes a seat in the back row and stares straight ahead, apparently oblivious to his appendages—and to the female dancer boarding the vehicle, whose dark hair is entirely hiding her face. She heaves along with her a white pillow as if it were a live thing, making squelching sound effects, before reassuming her anonymity and sitting down. This is Bausch’s world—a little like ours, but stranger: perhaps more like Walser’s Berlin of 1905, a city of would-be actors and artists, voyeurs and dilettantes, and elderly women with lipstick on their teeth. Pina reminds us of the ways we are all performing to one another and pretending to ignore others’ performances, and it’s one of the most blissful things I’ve ever seen on a rainy afternoon. Read More